The water element becomes blocked and consequently falls out of balance whenever the natural flow of feeling and emotions becomes impeded. It is very easy for the water element to become blocked as so many of us our taught directly or indirectly to suppress our feelings and deny them or try to change them.

This approach of emotional suppression is highly detrimental to our well being. Humans are emotional creatures, and feel a vast spectrum of emotions throughout the course of a day. Half of the emotions that we experience fall into the spectrum of unpleasant emotions such as fear, sadness, anxiety, anger, etc.

When we don’t allow ourselves to feel the negative emotions by rejecting them or attempting to block them out, they don’t simply disappear. Instead, they get trapped within your water element and create a ‘dam’ or a blockage because the emotion isn’t allowed to flow freely.

All of these blockages impair our overall emotional sensitivity, and the more we allow these blockages to form through emotional suppression, the less we will be able to feel overfall. You will essentially become increasingly numb to all emotions, including the positive ones, which will lower your enjoyment of life as you will lose the richness and depth offered by a balanced and free flowing water element.

Furthermore, the ‘dam’ can only expand so far before the pressure of the water cracks through it and eventually collapses it entirely. This can be a very painful and intense experience depending on the severity of your suppression.

Through suppressing our emotions, we create an emotional ‘void’ and cut ourselves off from experiencing intimacy. Intimacy is an essential need of the water element, and we will often mistake the yearning for intimacy as cravings for sex, food, drugs, etc. When really, all that we ultimately may desire is intimacy. We want to feel our water flowing and feeling that intimacy with ourselves.

It might not be readily apparent to you that you are suppressing your emotions, so you can take the following quiz to help you gauge if you have been building dams in your water element.

Take the quiz and find out if your water element is blocked

Emotions are feelers and need to be respected. There are no ‘wrong’ emotions and everything we feel exists for a reason. Emotions help us evaluate everything we experience to determine what we prefer and what we don’t prefer. They are also invaluable tools to learning more about ourselves.

The beliefs that we hold about ourselves and towards individual emotions is what ultimately leads to suppression. If we believe that experiencing certain emotions somehow devalues us, then we will be making every effort we can to suppress or avoid the emotion.

Yet these beliefs stem from the fallacy that merely experiencing an emotion can somehow lower or devalue your self-worth and deem you unworthy of love from others or yourself. This detrimental belief is responsible for a host of unnecessary painful experiences and diminished self-esteem.

We have created a chart that can help you identify which, if any, beliefs you may be holding that are causing you to suppress certain emotions.

Dam in the river belief chart

Next we will be covering the other side of an imbalanced Water element and what you experience when your Water overflows.

The water element, when balanced, is as a gently flowing stream. Inevitably, we face myriad storms throughout our life, but with a balanced water element the stream is contained through the ‘levee’ of our self-worth and compassionate, unconditional acceptance of all emotions we may experience.

Even when the ‘water levels’ rise greatly, it continues to flow and be contained within the stream causing little to no destruction of the surroundings. However, when the levee breaks through our negative beliefs towards ourselves, the destruction could be rampant.

We are human beings experiencing emotions, but the emotions do not define us. When we over identify with an emotion, we believe that we are the emotion and let it define us. Instead of us experiencing anger or sadness, we say that we are angry, or we are sad, etc. This over-identification with emotions can cause us to get stuck.

Since we believe that we are that emotion, we hold on to that emotion as tight as we can because we identify as it. To lose that emotion, is to lose our identity in that moment and that can be frightening and threatening.

Instead of allowing the emotions to flow through us, we latch on and focus exclusively on them. This leads to the emotions taking control of our lives, and they wreak great havoc in your personal and interpersonal life.

This attachment and identification can happen with both the positive, pleasant emotions and the negative, unpleasant ones. When we are feeling happy and try to capture it and hold on to it, we create this same unbalance within our water element. We identify with the joy and want to remain in this pleasant state indefinitely, but that very act of trying to capture it is what prevents us from attaining it.

If this is sounding all too familiar to you, the following quiz can help you recognize if your water element is overflowing:

[Take the quiz and find out if your water element is overflowing]

The beliefs that cause this imbalance in our water element center around our perception of ourselves. When our feelings of self-worth and our self-image is negative or fragile, that’s when we end up over-identifying with our emotions.

Our emotional identity (founded in the water element) plays a vital role in our feeling of self-worth or lack thereof. When we are not viewing ourselves positively, and our unsure of our own worth or externalize it, we become susceptible to a fragile sense of self. Then when we experience emotions with intensity, we shift our identity to assume that of the emotion. When we are sad, we become a sad or depressed person.

This identification can further devalue our self-worth and we may be ashamed for being a sad person, or an angry person, or whatever other intense unpleasant emotion we are experiencing. However, feeling sad or angry does not make us a sad or angry person any more than wearing a hat makes us a hat. That sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? Yet that’s what we do when we assume our identity to be that of an emotion. Emotions come and go, that is their nature. We don’t become them, unless we choose to. We simply ‘wear’ them for a time as they flow through us.

This process plays out the same way with pleasant emotions such as happiness or excitement when we hold negative beliefs about ourselves. By assuming those positive emotions as your identity, and think that we are a happy person because that’s how we are feeling right now, we leave yourself vulnerable to the ever-changing tide of emotions. As mentioned earlier, emotions are just our ‘feelers’ for evaluating our experience.

When we feel happy, it’s because of an action or behavior that aligns with our values and what we favour. However, falsely identifying with that happiness shatters our identify when that emotion flows through us and passes. Instead, our emotional identity needs to be derived from viewing ourselves in a positive, holistic way with self-compassion.

The following chart can help you recognize which negative beliefs about yourself you may be holding on to that diminish your self-image and self-worth.

[broken levee belief chart]

With a thorough understanding of how detrimental an unbalance in your water element is, we will move on to the final step in this module: learning to balance the water element.

[link to balance section]